Saving money by making your own invitations

Here are 25 (okay, 26) valuable lessons to be had from the DIY invitations portion of your wedding-planning experience. Follow these easy steps and you may only have to pause to cry two times!
1. Start making your guest list a year before the wedding. More than a year. That way you and your five collective parents will have plenty of time to remember to add more people, and you'll have extra months to feel guilty about not inviting everyone you'd like to invite.
2. About the same time you start making the guest list, start reading wedding blogs. Learn about a discontinued Japanese tabletop screen printing system called Gocco. Decide you will Gocco your wedding invitations. You will save money by making your own invitations! How frugal and creative of you.
3. Also while reading wedding blogs, fall in love with pocketfolds. Decide only pocketfolds will do for your wedding invitations.
4. Find out how much pocketfolds cost. Choke on your tongue. Frugal? Not so much.
5. Spend some time comparison shopping for pocketfolds. Find a tutorial that shows how to make your own. Decide you're up for the task.
6. Clip the Michaels 40 percent off coupon out of the Sunday paper and invest in a Martha Stewart scoring board and bone folder. Whip up some sample pocketfolds. Note that "whipping up" takes approximately five to 10 minutes per pocketfold. Do some quick math.
7. Cry for a while.
8. Put pocketfolds out of your mind. Pocketfolds are dead to you. Pocketfolds are so last year.
9. In the meantime, bid on a Gocco on eBay. When the box comes airmail from Japan, open it one time, find yourself completely intimidated, and put the box on a shelf for several months.
10. Turn your attention to your fiancé's idea of invitations that look like theater tickets. Decide you will use the Cricut you got on sale during spring wedding invitations Friday to cut out custom invitations. Shop around until you find a Cricut cartridge with a ticket shape. Notice the cartridge will also cut a ticket booklet shape. Decide if you can't have pocketfolds, you will have booklets. It's good that you have picked a very complicated and time-consuming design; this will make victory that much sweeter when they are finally done.
11. Order paper online. Find out how much it costs to ship paper to Alaska. Cry a little.
12. Decide you will make invitation cutting a fun group activity, like building a pyramid or working on a chain gang. Invite your mother and your cousin over for an invitation cutting party. After about five minutes, realize your assembly line is actually slowing the process down and actually kind of stressing you out a little bit. Decide you will cut the rest out yourself.
13. One night in the middle of cutting your invitations, have a panic attack about running out of Gocco ink, which is reportedly no longer in production and is available only from the Gocco fanatics who have stockpiled it and now sell it by the single tube on Etsy and eBay. Order twice as much ink as you think you will need. To save money on the screens and bulbs you need to burn master screens for your prints, order "just like Gocco" mount-them-yourself screens and off-brand bulbs from a website you heard about on a wedding blog.
14. Severely underestimate the amount of time it will take to cut out the thousand pages of invitation booklet you now need. Spend many, many weeknights cutting out page after page. How many weeknights? Here's an indicator: You will re-watch the entire first season of "Glee" on DVD while you Butterfly Wedding Invitations. The season finale will coincide with the final cut.